WebLITE takes a modular approach to web applications, enabling small to large sized businesses an affordable way to achieve a manageable, effective and interactive online presence. Established in 2004, it now has hundreds of customers across Malaysia.

Regaining control

As well as offering web applications and related services, WebLITE also provides customer service. This is an integral part of its offering and has been since its inception. But according to WebLITE owner and chief executive Jeffri Shahul Hamid, it hasn’t always been easy to manage.

“For the first six years of trading we were overwhelmed by customer service emails,” Jeffri said. “We were very hands-on with our approach and so our customers were used to simply picking up the phone to receive the level of service they required. We recognized that this was not only time consuming, but also often lacked continuity. Because everyone had historically been responsible for customer service, there was no helicopter view. It’s probably fair to say that tickets went unanswered or were not properly followed up, and we had no analytics to understand ticket volumes or success rates. We recognized that as a business, it was holding us back. We needed to regain control by being smarter about how we managed our customer service if we were to grow and evolve.”

Up, running and transforming customer service in two weeks

Jeffri started to research options online. After trialling several solutions, he came across Zendesk and, impressed by the caliber of its customers, he decided to trial the product.

“We were up and running on Zendesk just two weeks after we started our trial and it immediately transformed the way in which we handled our customer service,” Jeffri said. “Having the ability to use automated responses to common issues helped us reduce our manual ticket responses by at least 40 percent. This enabled us to free up staff to work elsewhere in the business, and with more time to think we’ve been able to take a fresh look at how we wanted to structure our customer service moving forward. Our first move was to ring fence responsibility to just three senior managers who now collectively make up our dedicated customer service team. We then set about re-educating our customers. Because the Zendesk interface is so easy to use they took to it really well. These seemingly simple changes have made a huge impact on the productivity of our business.”

Speeding up customer response

One of the most valuable Zendesk features for WebLITE has been the iPad and iPhone apps, both of which enable the customer service team to communicate with clients on the move.

“Being quick to respond is what sets us apart,” Jeffri said. “Zendesk enables us to do this. In addition to the iPad and iPhone apps, we also use templates and macros to improve our performance. We’ve configured ourselves internally so that if tickets are not responded to after 24 hours then team members receive an urgent reminder. Collectively these have all contributed to us achieving an average first response times of four hours or less. We think that’s pretty impressive,” Jeffri said.

Scaling up for the future

WebLITE intends to scale up its Zendesk plan in order to take advantage of further features. “Zendesk is designed to grow with your business needs,” Jeffri said. “While our original plan has served us well up until now, we want to explore other elements of Zendesk. In particular, we are interested in the knowledge base and documents so that we can improve our depth of service and encourage our customers to self-help where applicable. We are pleased with our progress to date and we’re looking forward to finding other ways in which Zendesk can help us improve our business.”